Optimum Hard Drive Configuration

[danialhanson]

I recently built a new computer from parts, and included an Asus Rampage IV Black Edition Motherboard. Storage was one of a few things that I had planned to update at a later time, and earlier this week Newegg was running a one-day sale on 3TB hard drives. I bought three of them (Link).

I currently have one 250GB hard drive for my OS, and one 500GB hard drive for storage. My plan was to pull both of these, and configure my 3x3TB drives in a RAID 5, and then install the OS on that RAID and just use that as one logical drive for my OS and all of my files.

One of my friends suggested I use the existing 500GB drive for the OS, and then use the 3x3TB drives for storage in some form of RAID or by using Windows disk management to configure them as one drive for my files. With this method, I could also use Acronis (or something similar) to store a backup of my OS drive on the 3x3TB array. My concerns with this are: I don't know if I can configure 3 drives in a RAID 5, and then another drive as a "stand alone" from a BIOS level with my MOBO. If I can't, I would then have to use Windows disk management to configure the 3x3TB array, and if I did that, and my primary drive died, I'm afraid I'd lose my ability to logically access all of that data.

SO: Given my situation, and my collection of disks (1x250GB, 1x500GB, 3x3TB), what would be the best way for me to configure them for optimum performance, with redundancy being a mandatory factor?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

 

[Blades32744]

I would say do what your friend said about using the 500 gig for the os and your 3tb drives for storage. The reason being is if with Raid 5 you know that if 1 drive fails you can still survive but since you bought 3 of the same hard drives as soon as one goes the rest will go shortly after most likely. For fail safe purposes I think installing the OS on the 500gb hard drive is your best option so if your os ever becomes corrupted so wiping the drive isnt a big deal being that it is a smaller hard drive to wipe and you still keep all your data across your other drives. If you really want speed you could do raid 0 with 2 of the tb drives and save the third for backups.